It's Good to Be the King

by James Robert Parish

  There was some discussion of Brooks being in charge of writing a new TV show, but that did not come to pass. He seemed unfazed about all this, as he had grand visions of using his newfound freedom to become a Broadway playwright. However, he quickly discovered that after years of being part of a close-knit team of comedy writers, he lacked the requisite discipline or the inclination to work on his own—at least at this juncture. Weeks passed and he had to tap into his savings from the Your Show of Shows years so that he and Florence could maintain their Manhattan lifestyle.

  • • •

  Sid Caesar’s new small-screen offering, Caesar’s Hour, debuted on Friday, September 27, 1954, broadcasting live from Manhattan’s Century Theater. The program received a generally warm welcome (more so for Caesar’s return to the medium than for his current vehicle). Within his 60-minute showcase he chose to do a book show, using an extended sketch format to fill most of his hour on the air. The program eschewed those ingredients (such as classical music, opera, and song-and-dance production numbers) that had been so beloved by Max Liebman. On the series’ premiere, the Italian movie actress Gina Lollobrigida displayed her sexpot charms as Sid’s leading lady. The script was by head writer Mel Tolkin and his team (Tony Webster, Joe Stein, and Aaron Ruben), with, of course, the unofficial collaboration of Caesar and suggestions provided by Carl Reiner and Howard Morris.

  A few days thereafter, on Saturday, October 2, 1954, Coca bowed in The Imogene Coca Show, a half-hour offering that seemed a rudderless shamble. Variety reported that there was “something frantic and almost desperate about the new so-called ‘situation comedy,’ which marks the premiere of Miss Coca as a TV star in her own right.” The misguided project suffered from its star not having the oversized personality, ego, or inclination to grab control of her own show and give it much-needed focus and direction. Instead, she had fallen prey to network and agency executives who had tried, unsuccessfully, to thrust her into a format and persona that did not suit her admirable, unique talents. As a result, the series opener, written by Lucille Kallen, Max Wilk, and Ernest Kinoy, was a big disappointment to critics and home viewers alike.

  Two additional writers (Hal Goodman and Larry Klein) were brought in to give Imogene’s struggling property a new slant. After two weeks, the new scribes admitted defeat and left. At this chaotic juncture, the William Morris Agency (which had packaged the failing property), brought in yet another writer: Mel Brooks. He was already a big Coca fan and was very familiar with both her strong and weak points. Another impetus for Brooks was the healthy salary he was given for coming to his friend’s rescue.

  Unfortunately, things got off to a bad start for Mel on this assignment. With neither the strong-willed Caesar nor the well-disciplined Mel Tolkin to harness Brooks’s unrestrained energy, Mel charged into the proceedings like a veritable loose cannon. While this was occurring, increasingly desperate network bigwigs ordained that Imogene’s inauspicious showcase should switch its format. Thus, two weeks after the property’s premiere, cast members Billy DeWolfe and Ruth Donnelly were let go. The sitcom was converted into a half-hour comedy/variety show, complete with production numbers, sketches, and guest stars. This changeover was not well received by audiences, and Coca’s ill-fated show altered its setup again in February 1955—reverting to being a traditional sitcom. Now Coca was presented as a newlywed (her spouse was played by Hal March) and the “amusing” misadventures they experienced with their neighbors (portrayed by Bibi Osterwald and David Burns).

  Meanwhile, Mel’s presence on Coca’s writing squad had proved to be problematic. He was supposed to be the much-needed catalyst to push the failing program in a more satisfying direction. Instead, the boisterous, aggressive, and often undisciplined newcomer created dissension in the writers’ room. Even worse, he failed to provide the hoped-for salvation for this sinking entity. Brooks seemed preoccupied with running to and fro at rehearsals, offering the cast and the director a rash of what proved to be unusable suggestions One of the show’s creative team assessed the situation by saying Mel was “substituting energy and noise for any ideas.”

  When Brooks attended the show conferences in the writers’ room, he was often overbearing and frequently tried to steamroll his ideas past the other participants. For those who had not worked with Mel before, the experience of dealing with this disorderly whirlwind force was unsettling. For Lucille Kallen, the show’s head writer, Brooks’s all-too-familiar gambit of being the juvenile show-off and a wild man was a time waster, especially when one was fighting to save a sinking project. It led to an inevitable flare-up between the already frazzled Lucille and the stubborn Mel.

  At one of the writers’ meetings, the dogmatic and overassertive Brooks—unwilling or unable to analyze the show’s overall problems and make concrete suggestions about how to alter course—instead put forth for consideration one of his typical zany, off-the-wall jokes. On its own it was amusing. However, in the context of the sitcom it had no relevance. This led to a clash of wills between Lucille and Mel.

  Kallen: “That’s very funny, Mel, but we can’t use it.”

  Brooks: “Don’t you tell me what’s funny, you just type.”

  This condescending remark angered Lucille so deeply that she could not even respond to her adversary. Instead, she rushed off to find the show’s producer. After she recapped the distressing situation, she gave her boss an ultimatum regarding Mel: “It’s come down to a point where it’s either him or the rest of us.” Eventually, a truce was reached between the opposing writing camps. It was decreed that Kallen and her squad should work together, while the disruptive Brooks would operate on his own. Each faction would exchange material but only in writing.

  This splintered manner of script creation only furthered the chaos on The Imogene Coca Show. By June 25, 1955, the misfire had gone off the air. Nonetheless, the network had not lost faith in Coca’s fey talents and set about fashioning a new vehicle for her—one that would not include the services of Mr. Brooks.

  • • •

  While Mel Brooks had been running amok on Imogene Coca’s ill-advised program, Sid Caesar had been undergoing his own baptism under fire as the producer and star of Caesar’s Hour, as well as an unofficial writer. By early 1955, his show had begun to dip seriously in the ratings. To counter the slide, Caesar abandoned the show’s book format in favor of making it a comedy/variety outing. (Unlike Your Show of Shows, the sketches were the key ingredient of Sid’s show, with the musical production numbers taking a distinct second position.)

  While the delicious on-camera chemistry that Caesar had enjoyed with Imogene Coca would be hard to match, he found a viable substitute in Nanette Fabray. Fabray was a veteran of films and several Broadway musicals. Previously, she had appeared as a guest on Your Show of Shows (at a time when she was married to David Tebet, an NBC publicist turned network executive). When Nanette accepted the offer to be Sid’s leading lady, she was just recovering from a nervous breakdown, triggered by learning that her persistent ear ailments might, one day, lead to permanent deafness. (Eventually, her condition was fully corrected through surgery.)

  Just as Mel had missed the comforting familiarity and professional safety net of working for his alter ego and friend, so Caesar had missed both the zaniness and loyalty of his longtime comrade. The two parties bridged the delicate gap caused by Brooks’s “defection” to the Coca camp, and Mel was contracted to return to Caesar’s writing team. The arrangement allowed Mel to get back to work in an environment in which he knew he could function well. However, because Brooks was such a complex individual, his relief and gratefulness at returning to Sid’s fold was mixed with an underlying, suppressed resentment over the fact that, once again, he had to be in his friend’s orbit. At least he would now be assured of a steady paycheck, he hoped for a long time to come.

  • • •

  On September 26, 1955, Caesar’s Hour launched its second year of broadcast. One of the opener’s highlights was a new installment of “T
he Commuters,” the domestic skit that paralleled “The Hickenloopers” routines from Your Show of Shows. This recurring husband-and-wife sketch allowed both Sid and Nanette to shine, and the story line provided sufficient small-screen time for Carl Reiner and Howard Morris as friends of the couple. The evening’s other playlet was a satire on gangster movies, which interweaved club-style musical numbers into the proceedings.

  For Caesar’s new season, the writers’ room (based in Sid’s headquarters at the Milgrim building on West 57th Street near Fifth Avenue) was home to Mel Tolkin, Larry Gelbart, Sheldon Keller, Mel Brooks, and the group’s lone female, comedian/writer Selma Diamond. With no Max Liebman in control and Caesar’s production company signing everyone’s paychecks, Sid ran the writers’ room far more autocratically than before. (Appreciating their subservient position, the staff presented the star with a gold, throne-style chair in which Sid could hold forth royally while his writers sweated to put together that week’s sketches.)

  Typically, the writers congregated daily in their small office by about 10 A.M. Their plan was to get their creative juices rolling before Caesar arrived on the scene. As before, Brooks, the frequent insomniac, was always late. (It should be noted that his delayed appearance allowed him to stand out from the other writers, and it also served to postpone the moment when he would be under pressure to compete with his peers to please boss man Caesar.) Typically, Mel signaled his tardy arrival by having a bagel and coffee delivered to the smoke-filled writers’ room. The snack would arrive well in advance of Mel’s belated entrance. One day, Sid decided to teach Mel a lesson for being especially late. When Brooks walked through the writers’ room door, Caesar signaled him to approach his throne chair. The boss quietly informed his persistently late staffer that he had already tipped the delivery boy for bringing Brooks’s breakfast. Mel thanked Sid and handed him some change, thinking that would cover the cost of the order plus a very small tip. Not enough, said Caesar. Sid explained that he had given the boy $20 for the delivery. A disgruntled Brooks begrudgingly paid the difference. For a while thereafter, he was more conscientious about being on time to the office. However, he soon fell back into his old ways.

  Usually, when Caesar strolled into the writers’ room—always dressed in a neatly pressed suit, one with wide shoulders—he would be puffing on a big fat cigar. Typically, his first words to the staffers were “Show me the brilliance.” This led the apprehensive writers to scramble madly into position to present their latest joke or suggestion for a new skit. Once Sid was seated on his throne chair (and often stripped down to his underwear so he wouldn’t wrinkle his expensive suit), Caesar would glance over to ensure that Michael Stewart, the newcomer hired to type notes of these meetings, was poised at the typewriter (as Lucille Kallen had been in Your Show of Shows days). Stewart’s unenviable task was to consolidate the wild chattering in the room into a semblance of written order. Thankfully, young Michael got some direction from the mighty Sid.

  As the jokester gang shot forth ideas—aided and abetted by the show’s second and third bananas (Carl Reiner and Howie Morris)—Caesar listened in rapt attention to the cacophony of noise. If he liked an idea one of the writers was shouting out, he signaled by nodding or by pointing a finger in Stewart’s direction that he should take down this bit of comedic genius. If a joke displeased Caesar, he might shake his head. If he found the offered brilliance too far off the mark, he would adopt his posture as a gunner, shooting down the bad joke from the sky. (In the process, Sid provided the rat-a-tat sound effects of the machine gun blasting away at the offensive offering.)

  Mel Brooks recalled (nostalgically) of those madcap, raucous sessions in the cigar smoke-filled writers’ room (where a spread of food and candy was set out daily by Sid’s brother, Dave), “We all thought alike. We all came from basically the same background, the second-generation Russian-Ukrainian-Jewish intellectual heritage.” Of writing for, and with, the great Caesar, Brooks noted, “Sid was a natural philosopher. He very quickly passed the verbiage of intellectuality. We never dealt in polysyllabics. We talked. ‘Why were we born? Why are we here?’ Then we could write good material and we could portray characters that we knew very clearly. But without wit. We never adored wit.” As to what were allowable topics for their comedy, Mel offered years later, “Whatever made us laugh was the only test of what would go into the hopper. I feel that the audience is always ready to absorb anything you have in your mind. They don’t reject it based on their own sense of values.” (One subject that was off limits on both Your Show of Shows and Caesar’s Hour was topical politics. In the 1950s era of conformity and cold war paranoia, most TV shows had the same policy.)

  Mel Tolkin had his own assessment of how this highly talented, frequently changing contingent of diverse personalities operated on Your Show of Shows and Caesar’s Hour. “There was always, among the writers, a combination of competitiveness and anger, and an immense need to be loved by Max Liebman and Sid.” The head writer pointed out, “There is a lot of anger behind comedy. There was so much violence, so much comedy in that room. A lot of jokes about death and murder, dirty language, quarrels, conflict, a lot of yelling. Sid punched the wall so much it was bent. You’d take a drink from a paper cup from the water cooler and the cups would be squeezed and thrown around. We’d throw pencils so they stuck in the acoustical ceiling. It was all creative anger, terrible competitiveness, trying to please Daddy. Sid of course was Daddy. And don’t forget, we were asked not to be merely good but to be brilliant.” In Tolkin’s estimation, “To entertain is a search for love. Applause is a kiss, silence is a knife in the back. The comedian has to ask himself, or herself, ‘How much love does the world want? How much do I have to prove?’”

  Carl Reiner, who went on to produce, direct, and write TV sitcoms and feature films, was once asked how the writing squad at Caesar’s Hour and the earlier Your Show of Shows could be funny at a given time within the nine-to-five workday. The second banana responded, “The answer lies in the nature of the comic beast. Professional comedy writers and performers will be funny wherever and whenever they are brought together. They are programmed to produce laughter, and when there is a job at stake, a professional reputation involved, and a wife or husband to be told on Saturday night, ‘That’s my joke,’ the comedic motor quickly turns over.… All comedians are writers. Some are talking writers; others are writers who work for performers. The pros among them could no more turn off their fun-loving mechanism than a certified public accountant could suspend his knowledge of the multiplication tables.”

  As to the particular creative contributions of the perpetually tardy Brooks, Reiner recalled, “When Mel came to work a sketch would often be half written. He’d come in angry, and he’d listen to us and he’d say, ‘All shit.’ And he would start to try to destroy things that were written. Well, because Mel is really one of the funniest human beings in the world, he was able very often to improve on the jokes that were already written. He had to prove he could come in late and contribute at least his share or more. Mel coming in at one [P.M.] was a better commodity to have than a bum who came in early.”

  • • •

  During these years, Brooks spent far more time with his collaborators at Caesar’s Hour than he did with Florence, his wife. The day’s work and shenanigans often spilled over into the evening, ending up with drinks and dinner with Sid after they had quit for the day or before heading back to the offices to repair an unsatisfactory sketch. (Sometimes the food/ alcohol breaks were at Danny’s Hideaway or at Lindy’s restaurant.)

  As at the office, the writing crew and the others in attendance had to deal with the vagaries of Caesar, who in recent years had become even more addicted to pills and booze. On one famous occasion, the group was seated around the dinner table, having just placed their orders. This evening, a particularly exhausted Sid was no match for the array of selfmedication he had consumed that day. Suddenly, he fell over face forward, landing in a dish of coleslaw. The gang knew bette
r than to arouse the volatile Sid from his stupor. Instead, for the next 40 minutes they played a variety of charades to disguise from the restaurant’s patrons and staff that the mighty Caesar was unconscious. They performed ad-libbed routines and bits of business—such as “Let us all bend our heads down and pray”—waiting for Sid to eventually revive. He finally did so and continued on with his previous discussion, totally unaware that he had blacked out.

  Not only were the demands and competition of work enough to keep Mel away from his home, but he also still felt ill at ease playing the role of husband. He was not sure what was truly expected of him and what he should require of Florence. In those first years they rarely ate at home. He preferred to be out and about in public surroundings. These settings avoided awkward domestic silences and gave him fresh locations and new audiences in which to be “on” and go into one of his nutty routines, which provided him with the attention he craved. (That these bouts of zaniness might be embarrassing to Florence or others caught in the situation never seemed to faze Brooks.)

  Frequently, Brooks and his wife joined Sid and Carl and their wives for dinners, to see foreign movies (which was good fodder for their TV work), or to attend art exhibits. In the summer, Mel and Florence often visited Carl and Estelle Reiner at their Fire Island retreat and fell in love with the vacation spot, which had such a relaxed tempo and was populated with members of the show business crowd. Sometimes, the Brookses attended industry functions together. As always, no one knew what to expect from the attention-seeking Mel, who marched to his own beat.